Elite D.C. school teacher who replaced bin Laden on Most Wanted list sentenced

Eric Toth, the elite D.C. private school teacher who replaced Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s notorious Most Wanted list, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for production of child porn and other charges.

The former third-grade teacher at the Beauvoir Elementary School at the Washington Cathedral was captured last April in Nicaragua after federal agents received a tip from an American traveling through Central America.

Toth had disappeared in June 2008 after pornographic images of young boys were found on Toth’s camera at the elite private school that catered to the nation’s rich and well-connected.

“For the next 25 years, Eric Toth will be where he deserves to be — in a federal prison where he cannot harm any more children,” said U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen Jr.

Toth’s exploitation of children spanned several years and states, and involved secret videos, investigators said.

Toth had installed hidden cameras inside a bathroom at Beauvoir, and recorded more than a dozen children under the age of 10. He videotaped a sleeping boy as a summer camp counselor in Wisconsin in 2005; and two years later filmed himself molesting a Maryland boy.

The chase for Toth began in Jun2 2008, shortly after officials at the Beauvoir school removed him from campus and called police. Before detectives could interview him, Toth vanished, heading straight for his home in Indiana. He dumped his car at a Minneapolis parking lot and left a fake suicide note saying his body could be found in a nearby lake.

Authorities followed the evidence to Illinois, then Wisconsin, before receiving a tip that placed him at a homeless shelter in Arizona in 2009.

After exhausting all leads, the FBI placed Toth on its iconic Ten Most Wanted list in April 2012, selected because he represented the emergence of a computer-savvy pedophiles and partly because FBI officials belived he would harm again.

Toth was the 495th person named to the FBI’s Most Wanted list, replacing the vacancy left open when Navy SEALs hunted down and killed terrorist Osama bin Laden.